Kominicki: Turns out this one idea wasn’t a flash in the pan

This week marked the seventh birthday of the “Flash Report,” the daily e-news bulletin that helped transform LIBN from a tiny, barely known business weekly into – we like to think, anyway – a player to be reckoned with in the regional news market.

E-blasts are ubiquitous to the point of banality today, thanks to Constant Contact and other services that allow anybody with an e-mail list to broadcast like the big boys. But back in 2002, e-publishing was a lunar landscape just waiting for someone to kick up a little dust.

I wish I could tell you the Flash was part of a brilliant, sweeping plan to catapult LIBN to the cutting edge of digital news delivery, but the thinking was much less sharp. Truth is, we were merely frustrated that Newsday printed stories we had but lacked a means of delivering.

As a result, our reporters often didn’t bother to cover breaking news, knowing that a Thursday story would be mighty crusty by the time our print deadline rolled around the following Wednesday. Better to stick to the phones and find stuff the dailies wouldn’t have.

That’s a niche, certainly, but one that looked suspiciously like a box canyon to me.

Of course, trying to compete with Newsday was a ridiculous notion back then. The business section there employed 36 people, the exact size of my entire company, including Frank, our cleaning guy. They had Pulitzers, we had only chutzpah.

But if nothing else, we figured, the Flash would force our reporters to actually venture out of the office, to such exotic places as Hauppauge and Melville and – dare I dream it? – Mineola.

Better yet, we could send out our e-news at day’s end, beating the morning print editions and, every once in a while, ruining the evenings of Newsday reporters who had to scramble to catch up to stories our Flash had alerted them to.

I suppose it reveals a flaw in my character, but I especially loved that part.

The fine folks at Invision, our Internet Service Provider – remember ISPs? – built the plumbing and figured out bandwidth and myriad other technical details, most still beyond my ken. Mike Watt, who was doing special projects for Invision at the time, moved into our newsroom and helped create the template into which news stories would be plugged. The inaugural Flash also featured a few bucolic bells and whistles, since discarded, including calendar items and a quote-of-the-day feature we called “Sotto Voce.”

A headline on that first April 8 Flash: “CA expects narrower loss.” The Dow closed at 10,249.

We built the original distribution list by pulling together every e-mail address we could find, first from our annual Book of Lists, then by roaming cubicle to cubicle, getting contributions from reporters, salespeople, circulation staffers, even members of the business office. After that, we called friends and customers to explain the product and beg for their lists. I’m still paying off some of those markers.

We also launched an in-house contest, giving cash prizes to employees who brought in the most new contacts, with bonuses for addresses that did not result in angry or threatening messages back. Invariably, a woman named Erica won. She left us before I ever got around to asking her secret.

Remember, this was back in the day before spam laws and double opt-ins, when “push” technology was a completely acceptable, and legal, form of marketing. Late in the game, Invision kicked in its own giant list, allowing us to hit more than 30,000 desktops every day.

One unexpected reward was from selling advertising on the Flash, including a daily sponsor’s banner and Google-style text ads. Those filled up in short order, forcing us to start a second daily edition at 11 a.m., which also perennially sold out. My biggest miscue was a couple of years ago, when I decided readers really didn’t rely on the Flash to get their daily look at the stock market’s close.

The mail was mighty ugly for the day or two it took to get the Wall Street report back in.

Whither the future? As with all things digital, your only mistake is in thinking you really know. Facebook is an increasingly popular way to push information to the business community, and Twitter is coming on fast as a news bulletin service. Sending reports to a Blackberry or cell phone is commonplace these days, and as you read this, there are thousands of baby-faced entrepreneurs out there creating the next billion-dollar thing.

Newsday’s business staff is a lot closer to mine in size these days, and the current consensus – if you can trust it – is that niche products will one day rule the world.

I suppose it reveals a flaw in my character, but I especially love that part.

Congrats on the seventh anniversary of the “Flash Report.” The concept, in a word favored by the Irish to describe all things magnificent, was brilliant. And it’s interesting to see how it’s still evolving. Just be careful not to “flash” too much of your print content before it arrives in mailboxes.